Stephen Hawking is at it again.
Not long ago he warned us about "aliens" from outer space potentially being a threat on our horizon. At this point, any sane person would have written off this confused soul. What may once have been a great mind has apparently degenerated into madness.
Mr. Hawking is at it again. While he has no difficulty believing in the existence of intelligent alien beings, the idea of a Creator-God is just too much for him. In his new book entitled "The Grand Design," Mr. Hawking writes, "..the universe can and will create itself from nothing...Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist..It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.."
While Mr. Hawking is waiting for the Mother-Ship to beam him up, let's examine what Dr. Gerald L. Schroeder has to say about the subject. In his book entitled "Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of Harmony Between Modern Science and the Bible," he writes, "In 1936, Alexander Ivanovich Oparin, a Russian biochemist, published a book titled 'The Origin of Life.' In it, he described the conditions likely to have existed on the primitive earth and the random chemical and physical processes possible in such an environment. These processes, he asserted, inevitably led to life. Seventeen years later, Stanley Miller used almost these same conditions in his experiment to produce amino acids. Oparin speculated and Miller proved that lightning and other sources of energy naturally present on Earth could convert inorganic molecules into several of the compounds present in life.
But how was nature to get these individual molecules organized into the complex array found even in the simplest forms of life? In theory, the needed sequence that would carry the basic molecules through the complex path ending in a true protein could occur step-by-step in chance reactions over long periods of time. The difficulty with such a slow and random process is that just as there is a given probability of forming an intermediate product in this chain of products leading to life, there is also a probability of its spontaneous dissolution.
At each step as we go from simple to more complex compounds, we are in a sense swimming upstream in the flow of entropy. The result is that the likelihood of the disintegration of a newly formed organic compound is much greater than the likelihood of its formation.
If destruction predominates over formation, how is it that living organisms regularly produce complex compounds and do so in copious amounts? Life does it by working in the highly protected environment within its cells, by using catalysts that have the ability to select and concentrate the needed chemicals and to increase rates and extents of reactions, and by expending considerable energy to accomplish the tasks. The protected environment needed by life is found within life itself.
From the simplest to the highest forms of life, if the cellular system fails, the organism dies. Its subsequent rapid decay is clear evidence for the chemical instability of the compounds from which life is composed. The catalysts of living organisms, called enzymes, are themselves proteins produced by already-living cells. A reaction that may take seconds within an enzyme-driven, temperature-controlled 98 degrees Farenheit system of an animal might take years or longer in an uncatalyzed system. Neither enzyme nor protective cell wall were available to the molecules that preceded life. As we experience it, life is required to produce life." (pp. 109-110).
So what's behind Mr. Hawking's fantasy? Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand said it best: "The egocentric sovereignty that modern man arrogates to himself bans everything that has the character of coming from above, of imposing bonds upon us, and of calling for an adequate response. Modern man also shuns all the factors in life which are gifts, which he cannot grant to himself: they remind him of his dependence upon something greater than himself and above himself..."
It has been said that there is a fine line between genius and madness. I think Stephen Hawking has crossed that line.
